New Zealand Memories - Issue 140

APPET I SER

Pomp and Ceremony The Burnham Camp Band march out of Colombo Street into Christchurch Square during Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 Coronation Parade. Contributor Alec McConnochie is far left with the Bb bass, the largest instrument in the brass band. Find additional photographs in this issue’s Canterbury regional section.

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E D I TORIAL

Dear Readers, It’s hard to beat Alwyn Owen’s particular brand of humour. We are privileged to glimpse a segment of the childhood years of this respected radio broadcaster and co-founder of the Spectrum documentary series. Spectrum aired each Sunday on Radio New Zealand from 1972; the oral histories recorded during the programme’s 44-year span are now an invaluable New Zealand archive. Owen’s article, Two Cabbage Trees, is set during the closing stages of the Great Depression when children made their own fun. And, it seems, Whangarei offered an enticing playground for energetic boys.

‘Silly Stunts’, another lighthearted contribution from David Hill, involves frivolous capping pranks during his years at Victoria University in the carefree ’60s and, as David adds, “when my hair was a very different colour”. Frivolous could never be a word to describe ‘Granny White’ of the Hawke’s Bay, a force to be reckoned with, in Gordon Tait’s astonishing but true account.

Along with the personal stories we have several excellent features: John Rosanowski takes us on a journey back to the middle of the nineteenth century with his excellent account of West Coast gold prospecting, Kaye Dragicevich invites readers to take an intimate peep at life in a 1920’s timber milling community while Matt Elliott unearths the history of a prestigious Auckland college.

Max Cryer makes another welcome appearance on our pages with his version of New Zealand expressions. “Ladies a Plate” has fooled newcomers to the country for decades, and where else in the world could men fix anything and everything with “Number 8 wire”?

I’ve noticed that the age range of contributing authors to New Zealand Memories is widening, perhaps indicative of a surge in historical interest. Long may this trend continue.

Wendy Rhodes, Editor

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C ON T EN TS

Graphic Design

Contents

Icon Design

Two Cabbage Trees

Editor Wendy Rhodes

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Administration

Western Hills, Whangarei; a boy’s playground. By Alwyn Owen.

David Rhodes Distributed by

250 Years

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Down the Garden

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Gold Rush to the Inangahua

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Ovato Subscriptions & Enquiries Phone tollfree: 0800 696 366 Mail: Freepost 91641, PO Box 17288, Green Lane, Auckland 1546 email: admin@memories.co.nz www.memories.co.nz Annual Subscription $79 for six issues (Price includes postage within NZ) For overseas postage: Add $59.00 for Australia Add $89.00 for Rest of the World Contributors Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection Bayliss, Sydney Blakie, Joyce Blakie, Megan Brockie, Bob Christie, C Creamer, John Crean, Mike Cryer, Max Dingwall, Paul Dragicevich, Kaye Elliott, Matt Exisle Publishing Hamilton, Douglas Hill, David Howell, D. McConnochie, Alec Owen, Alwyn Rosanowski, John Russell, Tony Smith, Malcolm State Library, Victoria Tait, Gordon Victoria University of Wellington Library Wood, Bev Opinions: Expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of New Zealand Memories.

Accuracy: While every effort has been made to present accurate information, the publishers take no responsibility for errors or omissions.

Copyright: All material as presented in New Zealand Memories is copyright to the publishers or the individual contributors as credited.

ISSN 1173-4159 October/ November 2019

Marking Cook’s first sighting of New Zealand.

A story of convenience by Bev Wood.

John Rosanowski’s account of West Coast gold prospecting.

Granny White

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Not your usual grandmother; a story by Gordon Tait.

Dunedin’s Chums Club

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Silly Stunts

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Elizabeth Pulford’s memories of Chums Club at the State Theatre David Hill remembers ‘Capping Week’ in Wellington.

New Zealand Expressions

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Max Cryer examines our colloquialisms.

From the Regions: Canterbury

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Life Around a Timber Mill

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Depression-era Ottoman Box Reveals the Past

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Rocky Beginnings for a Catholic Boys’ College

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From the Regions: Wellington / Wairarapa

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Mailbox

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New Zealand Almost Votes for Prohibition

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Index and Genealogy List

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Editor’s Choice : Nothing to Laugh About

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An article by Kaye Dragicevich set in the Far North.

Megan Blakie examines a piece of vintage furniture.

Matt Elliott on St Peter’s College, Auckland.

Administering ‘laughing gas’ for dental pain relief c.1910.

Cover image: Smoko time at Leyland O’Brien’s mill cookhouse at Mangatete /Kaingaroa in the Far North. Article on page 42.

Courtesy K. Dragicevich

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STO RY

Two Cabbage Trees Alwyn Owen

T

he Great Depression found us living in Whangarei’s Lovers Lane. Not through choice; nobody lived in Lovers Lane through choice. We were in Number Nine, one of three identical houses bound in trinity by a picket fence that ran the entire length of their pocket-handkerchief front sections. They were mean little houses; scruffy, basic, and ill-maintained by their absentee landlord, but they could be rented for fifteen bob a week – if you had fifteen bob a week.

Only one thing set Number Nine apart from its siblings – a cabbage tree that grew in a corner of the front section, making a useful distinguishing point: ‘It’s number nine, the one with the cabbage tree.’ But that’s as far as it went; the cabbage tree minded its own business and we minded ours, though its curiously segmented bark, slightly spongey to the touch, intrigued me as a child - as did the visiting morepork that once sat on a branch in broad daylight for half an afternoon. Other than that, the tree was simply a constant: the first thing my brother Huw and I saw in the morning when the curtains were drawn back, and the last at night. Saw, but never considered.

So there we were in Lovers Lane, fifteen-bob-a-week socialists, slogging our way through the hard years while we waited for the world to come to its senses, which it did – in this part of the world at least – in the mid-1930s. In late1937 we left that wretched house behind us and bought a home in Third Avenue.

That meant I was closer to the Western Hills, with new territory to explore, new friends, and early the following year, a start at Junior High School. And one day classmate Alan Pickmere told Bert Primmer and me that he and Dave Moreton had found a bottomless hole. That sounded intriguing and rather mysterious, and I couldn’t grasp the concept, but Bert

was openly derisive – a hole had to have a bottom.

Not this one, Alan said, because Dave had dropped a couple of stones down it, and there was absolutely no sound of them hitting the bottom; and when Bert still poured scorn on the idea of a bottomless hole Alan got mad, and invited us to come and see for ourselves.

So the following Sunday Bert and I, along with Rex Henderson, turned up at Alan’s place – the last house on Kauika Road, and literally within a stone’s throw of the Coronation Reserve.

With Dave Moreton at heel, Alan led us in single file along the level track at the base of the range, where the bush of the Western Hills lifted up almost from our feet.Two or three hundred yards along the track we reached a small stream, and here Alan stooped to pick up two fist-sized stones before continuing, until our way was barred by the remains of a wire fence that marked the southern boundary of the reserve.

Stepping over it, we were now on private land.

Different land.

Here the hills stepped back to make space for a level area filled with cabbage trees – dozens of them, hundreds maybe, because we couldn’t tell the full extent of the stand. To see cabbage trees singly or in groups of two or three was one thing, and for me, the norm; to see a grove of them was altogether different, and a little unsettling even. Cabbage trees weren’t supposed to grow like this. It wasn’t at all like the bush; the bush was a battleground where everything fought tooth and nail for space and light, but here there was no competition – no scrub, no undergrowth, no climbers... just the trees, and a litter of dead leaves on the rough grass around them. Yet even to a twelveyear-old there was some sort of beauty about it all. A calmness perhaps?

Alan led us a short way into the stand and circled

Standard Two, Whangarei Primary School in 1935.

Alwyn Owen is second left, front row: the untidy boy with his shirt sleeves flopping loose.

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STORY

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STO RY

around like a hound casting for scent, until “Here it is!” - and there was the bottomless hole.

It wasn’t much to look at, just a hole of perhaps a yard in diameter, and overhung with coarse grass, and Bert, Rex and I weren’t overimpressed. It was a hole; so what?

But “Watch this,” said Alan.

He reached out above the hole and opened his fist, and the stone dropped. There was no sound. No sound at all. Not a thump, not a splash, just... nothing. It was uncanny.

“I told you: it’s bottomless”.

“Can’t be,” said Bert.

“O.K., you tell me when this one hits the bottom then,” and he released the second stone.

The same result, and Bert looked just a little puzzled. A hole had to have a bottom, but this one was breaking all the rules.

We argued.

“If it’s got no bottom it must come out on the other side of the world, and you’d be able to see light at the far end,” said Rex. “Nuts!”

“Bet you would if you had a telescope.”

“No you wouldn’t, because there’s all this lava and stuff in the middle of the world.”

That was a rather uncomfortable thought from Bert - could our hole start fountaining red-hot lava at any moment? Or could it perhaps have a U bend, and come out somewhere else? Our imagination stopped there, nobody suggesting that like Alice’s rabbit-hole, it might be the entrance to another, surreal world. The argument never became really bitter, but Bert and Alan stuck firmly to their respective opinions, and finally Bert showed his contempt by unbuttoning his fly and peeing down the hole, though again, there was no sound – not even a tinkle of a splash.

We gave it away at that point; after all, you can’t spend a whole sunny afternoon staring at a hole in the ground even if it’s bottomless, so we back-tracked, and then climbed up to the Dead Horse.

All the local kids knew the Dead Horse, a rata vine that hung from a tree inclined over a small gully. It had been cut through close to the ground, and you could swing out on it and if you dared, let go and land on the gully’s opposite side. It was a great way to spend an hour or two.

But at school next morning the argument was renewed at interval, and between sucking milk from their half-pint bottles, Alan and Bert debated the subject all over again - was the hole truly bottomless, or was it not?

I’d had enough of it all, and by the time the bell rang for the start of the third period, I knew what I was going to do – I’d get a definitive answer from Mr Zohrab. After two terms, Mr Zohrab was by far my favourite teacher. He taught English and taught it superbly, and when he was swept up by the War two or three years later and subsequently killed in action, I truly mourned his death.

It wasn’t just that I loved English, it was simply that Mr Zohrab was the sort of teacher you felt would listen to an odd-sounding question and respond with a calm and reasoned answer.

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STORY

Whangarei in the summer of 1937 - 38. The ‘new’ Library was opened in 1937, and stands prominent in the aerial photograph. Lovers Lane is the white diagonal strip running parallel to the glasshouse, and Number Nine, with its cabbage tree, is at the far end of the lane.

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N AV I GATION

250 Years

Cook’s first New Zealand sighting

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n 6 October 1769, the bark HMS Endeavour reached New Zealand shores. On that auspicious day Lieutenant James Cook recorded the sighting of land in his journal: “at 2 p.m. saw land from the mast head bearing W by N, which we stood directly for, and could but just see it of the deck at sun set”. 1 Cook had been commissioned on a two-fold task: to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti – which had been accomplished in the June of 1769 – and, according to London’s Natural History Museum, “to examine the findings of a partially sighted land mass assumed to occupy much of the southern part of the globe” 2 . n

1 https://nzhistory.govt.nz/young-nick-sights-land 2 https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/hms-endeavour-250.html

Colour print of a painting by Nathaniel Dance of Captain James Cook. Shows Cook, in naval uniform, seated at a table with a map in front of him and the ocean out the window to his right.

Courtesy: State Library Victoria

Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. Ref: PUBL-00-37-25

Map of New Zealand by James Cook from his explorations of the country between 1769 and 1770.

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ART I C L E

Down the Garden Path Bev Wood

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own the end of the garden path, half hidden by the pepper tree with its gnarled trunk, was a tall, narrow, wooden building. To reach it we had to pass straggly bushes that leapt out to scratch our legs. Inside was a dark home to spiders with their curtains of webs, all sorts of unidentified creepy crawlies, occasionally a weta, and the invariable buzz of blowflies.

This was the ‘long drop’, ‘the outhouse’, ‘the bog’, ‘the lavatory’, ‘the john’ - or as my brother had recently heard, ‘the convenience’. But, when we were out of our parent’s earshot, it was ‘the dunny’. It was a typical dunny with a well-worn wooden platform with a seat with a hole in the middle, and a wooden lid to remove when required. A large can sat underneath and the whole place smelt of disinfectant. We spent as little time as possible in the dunny.

There were no night soil men out in the country to magically remove the contents in the dark of the night. Only when we stayed in town did we hear the clang and clatter of the night cart as the men went about the unenviable job with their trusty horse and cart. On the farm where we lived it was Dad’s task to dig a deep hole in the ground and then empty the can… while none of us kids were around.

Real toilet paper was a rarity so soon after the war.

Paper shortages were partly responsible, but it was a luxury many could not afford. Most of us made do with crinkly brown paper, or newspaper tied up with loops of string and nailed to the wall. Cutting the paper into squares was part of our childhood chores.

“The Times are hard and the Truth hurts,” Dad said.

The dunny wasn’t the place to sit and read a book - or to hide if it was our turn to do the dishes. It was in and out and back to the open air as quickly as possible. Sometimes my brother locked the door from the outside, turning the wooden latch and leaving me inside, screaming with a mixture of fear and rage.

“Mum, Mum. Peter’s locked me in the lavatory.”

Then I would hear him singing,

“Oh dear, what can the matter be, Three old maids were locked in the lavatory, They were there from Sunday to Saturday Nobody knew they were there”.

Just as I was reaching the tip of my terror, he’d let me out.

One day Mum was busy in the kitchen mixing batter for a cake and eyeing the coal range with a look of loathing. Her usual easy-going manner disappeared as soon as she started to battle the stove. Feeding coal and wood into the oven and getting the heat up to temperature was a real juggling exercise. She brushed her wispy hair back from her damp forehead and poured the cake mixture into a tin. My little sister and I hovered around waiting to lick the basin. Peter had disappeared. We heard him hammering away in the shed, whistling tunelessly. He was happy with his boy’s jobs.

My mother had invited two women for afternoon tea - her “posh town friends” we kids called them. Mum was doing her best to live up to their exalted standards of baking, but we could tell she was feeling apprehensive.

Baking wasn’t one of her accomplishments; we didn’t mind if her attempts failed, there’d be more yummy scraps for us to eat. Or if the worst came to the worst, the chooks would be well fed.

Later in the day we heard a car arriving. Mum and my little sister and I went to the gate to meet the visitors.

I could see Peter hiding in the bushes with a smirk on his face. He put his fingers to his lips and beckoned me over. As the women came round the corner of the house I heard a suppressed giggle coming from my mother, followed by her infectious laugh. The visitors joined in, giggling and guffawing in a most unladylike manner. Gone was the image of posh town ladies as they stood there cackling with amusement.

“Like chooks ready to lay,” Peter whispered.

On an old board nailed to a tree was a wiggly arrow which pointed down the path towards the dunny, and underneath it Peter had painted: ‘TO CONVENIENZ’. n

Postscript: Today my brother, flushed with success, has a posh town house with three toilets for his convenience – and he still can’t spell it.

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R E G I ONS

Stylish Turnout at the Salesyards The Hawarden Salesyard Company draws a crowd to their premises in the 1920s. Hawenden in North Canterbury is situated about 80 kilometres north of Christchurch.

Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ Ref: G41000-1/2

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C A N T ER BU RY

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F E AT U RE

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F EAT U R E

Life Around a Timber Mill

Kaye Dragicevich

Leyland O’Brien Timber Mill of Mangatete / Kaingaroa, between the years 1916 to 1923.

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E D I TOR’ S

CHOICE

Nothing to Laugh About Hawera photographer James McAllister had his camera at the ready when this patient in a Taranaki dental surgery was being administered nitrous oxide or ‘laughing gas’ for pain relief in about 1910. “Skilled dentists at that time could remove an entire set of teeth in just three minutes - which was necessary, as administering the gas for longer than this made patients ill and could kill them”.1 1 https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/30581/dental-surgery-around-1910 Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. G- 000329-1/1

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